Dehumanization In Elie Wiesel's Night

The Holocaust, what is the true depth of the word? As sad as it may seem, it affected the lives of millions because of the hate inside of one certain group of people, the Nazi's. Dehumanization is to deprive human qualities such as individuality or compassion. Victims of the Holocaust went through dehumanization simply to make the killing of others psychologically easy for the Nazi's. Many victims of the Holocaust suffered from various experiments which eventually led to the death. Some of the experiments were things such as: sun lamp, internal irrigation, hot bath, warming by body heat, freezing/hypothermia etc. The internal irrigation system is when, "the frozen victims would have water heated to a near blistering
temperature forcefully irrigated into the stomach, bladder, and intestines." (Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine) Why would anybody perform such horrible things on another human being? That is a question that many people still can't answer. It is much more complex than it may seem. The Nazi's wanted to make the victims do so many degrading things that they would appear to be subhuman. Killing somebody less than human was more justifiable to the Nazi's. One experiment that was conducted on a pair of Russians describes the torture that many victims went through. The experiment of the twins is graphically described, "the next part of the examination consisted of tubes being forced through their noses and into their lungs. They were then ventilated with a gas which caused them to cough so severely that they had to be restrained. The sputum from the lungs was collected for examination." (Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine) These sort of things went on throughout the camps and the victims were just being used as lab rats. The living conditions within camps played a major role in the deterioration of the victims. On September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the lives of anybody who wasn't part of the "superior Germanic race" changed forever. As soon as people began being sent away to various camps, the process of dehumanization started. Children were kidnapped from their homes and sent away to camps, and the children that were useless were killed by starvation, lethal injections, and disease. "Hitler initialed an order to kill institutionalized, handicapped patients deemed incurable." (THE CAMPS) Everybody who was thought to be useless was killed in some way. By the late 1930's there were hundreds of camps scattered throughout Germany; and camps were quickly being established throughout much more of Europe. In these camps "the death rates were so high, from malnutrition, typhus and exhaustion that the disposal of corpses became a serious problem." (THE CAMPS) The treatment in transporting and caring for the victims is probably one of the main factors in the dehumanization of people during Holocaust. The victims were treated inferior simply because of their nationality. The Nazi's made it a point to degrade these people in every way possible by taking away their rights and free will. Praying wasn't permitted and was often followed by death. Alexander Kimel, a Holocaust survivor, expresses how the Nazi's treated the victims: The Germans establishes a bureaucracy that dealt with people like we are dealing with commodities not even cattle. For example coal is mined, sorted, transported and burned in a casual manner, when it comes to transport cattle man is more careful; cattle requires the supply of fodder, water and proper facilities. The SS dealt with their victims like with commodities. People were collected, stored, transported to Gas Chambers for processing without any provision of food, water or sanitary facilitates. On the opposite the lack of food especially water was used cruelly for facilitating the destruction; hungry, thirsty, emaciated people do not resist.(Kimel) People were treated as though they weren't human and didn't deserve to live on the earth.
Hundreds, even thousands, of people died thinking that they were inferior to others because of the way they were born. My heart goes out for all the people that died during the Holocaust, and to all of the families that lost a love one. Nobody knows what it feels like unless they went thought it themselves. When reading Night the pain that the people went through is sad enough to make anybody want to take back the actions of the Nazi's. "We walked over pain-racked bodies. We trod on wounded faces. No cries. A few groans." (Wiesel, pg. 88) Although I read the horrifying facts about all the terrible things the victims had to go through, I can't imagine what it was like to actually had went through it. To watch your family be ripped apart, and then be separated and killed according to importance is something unthinkable. The process of dehumanization is so abundantly clear. Although it isn't spoken about very freely, it happened with everybody that went through the
Holocaust.